Somewhere East of Life. Brian Aldiss

I have never forgotten it.

      The morning was so beautiful and I so young that I got dressed and came downstairs early. At the turn of the stair I met a cleaning woman brushing the steps.

      She was withered but she gave me a lovely smile and then uttered the few English nouns she had finally found a use for. Swinging the broom as indicator, she said, ‘The green. The Sky. The sun. The street. The music!’

      And that was it. A spirited attempt to communicate.

      As is the Squire Quartet.

      Brian Aldiss

       Oxford, 2012

      1

      Friends in Sly Places

      It seemed right to take flowers. A gesture had to be made. A nurse accepted them from Burnell and stuck them in a glass vase. Burnell went and sat by his friend’s bedside.

      Peter Remenyi was still in a coma. He lay propped on pillows, looking the picture of health, his skin tanned, his jaw firm. So he had lain for two weeks, fed by drip, completely unaware of the outside world. Yesterday’s flowers dropped on a side table.

      Burnell had escaped from the car crash with nothing more than a bruised arm. He visited the hospital every day. He had taken to reading aloud to Remenyi, from Montaigne or the poets, hoping that something might penetrate that deep silence into which his friend had fallen.

      He stayed for half an hour. Rising to leave, he patted the patient’s cheek.

      ‘You always were a mad bugger at the wheel, Peter,’ he said, with some tenderness. ‘Stay put, old pal. Never give up the struggle. I’ll be back tomorrow. I have to go now. I have a date this evening with a beautiful lady, a star in the firmament of her sex.’

      It was the evening of all evenings. The sun went down in glory, the lights came up in competition. Budapest’s Hilton Hotel, installed in the ruins of a sacred site, piled on extra floodlighting. A reception was being held by World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, which several important functionaries from several important countries were attending.

      Everything was on a lavish scale, slightly tatty only round the edges. Gipsy orchestras raced through their notes in every available space. Their violins swooped through czardas after czardas, just as drink poured down throat after throat. A Ukrainian dance group threw themselves about with abandon in the centre of the main ballroom.

      Undeterred by wars in the Caucasus, the East, the Far East, and several points West, the guests paraded in finest array, embracing or snubbing one another. Powdered shoulders, jewels, and luxuriant moustaches were on display. Many smiled, some meant it. Suave waiters, Hungarian and Vietnamese, moved among the crowds, delivering messages, pouring Crimean champagne into ever ready glasses. Conversations surged and popped like the bubbles in the champagne. Some who talked looked over the shoulders of their partners, in search of escape; others moved in closer. Loving, lingering glances were exchanged. Formality increasingly gave way to something more physical. The most recent jokes circulated, political or scabrous in content. Gossip chased itself among the international guests, the potted palms.

      The air-conditioned atmosphere, as time wore on, became charged with alcoholic fumes, excitement, innuendo, enzymes, exaggeration, assignations, assassinations of character, and the most fragrant of sweats. Couples started to slip away. And Burnell looked deep into the green eyes of Blanche Bretesche, breathing faster while trying to keep his usual cool.

      He, she, and some of her friends, left the reception and went together into the warm night. Music came faintly to them. They climbed into taxis, to be whisked downhill and across the great glittering city of Budapest. Streets, shops, restaurants sped by. The extravagant elephantine Danubian city prospered, fat on arms sales and many wickednesses, as befitted the over-ripe heart of Europe.

      Burnell never quite learned the names of all his noisy new friends. His senses were alert to Blanche Bretesche, to her eyes, her lips, her breasts. Blanche was Director of the Spanish Section of WACH. One of her friends – the one in full evening dress – directed them to a restaurant he knew in Maijakovszki Street, near the opera house. Here were more crowds, more musics.

      The restaurant was neo-baroque, ornate inside and out. Though it was late, the place was crowded with a confusion of people, laughing, eating, drinking. Two inner courtyards were filled with tables. Burnell’s party found a free table in the second courtyard. Above them, along flower-draped balconies, a woman sang passionate Hungarian love songs. The man in evening dress, summoning a waiter, ordered wild game specialities, which were not available. Without argument, they settled for lecso all round, accompanied by mineral water and a red wine from Eger. Although the main point of the gathering was to enjoy each other’s company, the food was also excellent. The warm evening held its breath in the courtyard.

      Saying little as usual, Burnell allowed his gaze to alight on the flower of Blanche’s face as she talked. The quick wit of her replies always pleased him. Her contributions to subjects under discussion were shrewd, often dismissive. He liked that. She was as much a citizen of the talk as any of the men, though they did not defer to her. While the conversation grew wild and ribald, it remained magically on course, contributing, like all friendly talk, to a general understanding.

      When the question turned to a scientific paper of Blanche’s, he saw her quick look, sheltered under long dark lashes, turning more frequently to him, as if questioning. A signal flashed unspoken between them. Round the convivial table, between spates of talk, they applauded every song the resin-voiced woman sang, calling up to the balcony in acclamation, though they had scarcely listened to a note. And at two-thirty in the morning, Burnell summoned a taxi. The taxi carried him back through the scurrying town, with his right arm about Blanche Bretesche, to his hotel.

      Even before he woke next morning, he was conscious of her warmth. He found himself lying on his stomach. Her arm was across his back. Turning his head cautiously, he was able to watch her sleeping. Happiness flooded him.

      He had always admired the look of her, from the alert walk – much like a stalk, he thought – to the well-shaped intellectual head. With those closed green eyes went a dark colouring particularly to his taste, though her hair was now cut fashionably shorter than when they had first met, some six years ago. She had been Stephanie’s friend, and was about Stephanie’s age, thirty-four or so. Now she was his friend – truly a friend, trusting and direct.

      Raising himself gently, he surveyed her sprawling body. Nothing was one quarter as beautiful as the female body, no sky, no landscape.

      Blanche was calm about her lovemaking, not stormy. The affirmatives she had uttered still sounded in his ears. There was another sound now, in their shared room. Not merely the distant hum of traffic as it crossed the bridge from Buda to Pest. A fly buzzed against one of the window panes.

      Cautiously, Burnell manoeuvred himself out from under that arm with its lashes of dark hair chasing themselves from mid-forearm to elbow. Padding over to the window, he opened it. The bluebottle, after raging against the pane a minute longer, was caught by the breeze and made its escape into the open air.

      Perhaps it said to itself, ‘Ha, I figured my way out of that …’ But flies had no hold on truth. For all their countless generations born since glass was invented, they had never comprehended its nature, and so remained continually trapped by it.

      When he turned back into the room, Blanche’s eyes were open.

      ‘All the time I was asleep, one of that woman’s songs was going through my brain. What do you think she was singing about? Did you understand a word of it?’

      ‘It would be the usual things,’ he said, closing the window. ‘Love betrayed, a starry night, a white glove dropped in a garden …’

      She smiled. ‘I wonder what Neanderthals sang about, if they sang at all.’

      ‘Oh, I’d guess love betrayed, a starry night, and a white mammoth tusk dumped in the cave. Why?’

      ‘Some Catalan archaeologists have found an undisturbed cave in the